Sunday, October 4, 2009

A Nightmare on Elm Street trailer

Oh. Man.

I'm generally a fan of the Platinum Dunes remake series. Sure, they're a little too formulaic and polished to really capture the gritty nastiness of the originals, but they're clearly made with some degree of reverence to the legacies that spawn them.

Freddy, more than other monsters, succeeds or fails based on the actor who plays him. Jackie Earle Haley is a pretty good fit. From the limited dialogue he has in the trailer, it sounds like he's playing Freddy Krueger with a speech impediment. This adds a certain creepy weakness to the character, the kind of personality tic you'd expect from a child murdering pervert janitor. He seems less confident, less obviously malicious, and more creepily evil. The trailer starts with a powerful man chasing a scared Freddy into the boiler room and we get the sense that he's a damaged and weak man, preying on kids, and the Elm street parents are a little too eager to see justice done. Maybe I'm wishful thinking here, but I really hope that the death of Freddy Krueger isn't as cut-and-dry as it was in the original.

The Platinum Dunes monsters have mostly been confined to the real world. This has worked well in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th but it may work against them for the Elm Street remake. Given the flair and visual artistry of the previous entries, there isn't a lot of razzle-dazzle in the trailer. The dream sequences look brightly lit and barren and vaguely post-apocalyptic. The film makers have a lot of nods to the original, particularly with the bathtubs and the levitating bodies and the corpses dragged down hallways, but I'm hoping that the dream sequences keep that disjointed, creepy vibe from the originals.